Posted by
NOTLEGALROADKILLYET on Saturday, January 27, 2007 10:31:14 PM
I have to laugh at the Gazette Telegraph. It keeps printing articles in the hope that they will keep people from reading blogs.
Just after the New Year, they published a George Will column which I ridiculed in an essay I called "George Will, Luddite." Yesterday, they published "TV critics' tour news roundup: Shocking, inspiring, depressing," a Sacramento Bee article by Rick Kushman. I would love to link it, but they didn't (dare) put it on the net. Quoting:
If you hang around TV people long enough, you learn some wild things. My favorite fact, after two weeks of meetings, chatting, and general hanging out with television executives, producers and stars on the annual television critics tour is this:
Only 8 percent of Americans read blogs. Eight percent. For all the energy that TV networks-not to mention political operations, and frankly newspapers and news organizations-put into the blogosphere, it is a tiny percentage of people who even notice.
That came from CBS chief research officer, David Poltrack, and MRI Research, a respected New York firm that sampled 20,000 people.
I think you all blog each other, but I'm not sure the rest of the world is joining in the process that much, Poltrack said.
Ummmm. Wasn't CBS Anchor Dan Rather brought down and CBS discredited in large part by the detective work of Powerline and others (with the help of their readers)?
If the Gazette Telegraph wants to discredit bloggers, and they seem to, you would think that it could find a more reputable source that a CBS researcher with the curious name "Poltrack." I wonder what his real name is? (Just kidding!)
The Gazette Telegraph would do well to think about who the 8% is, and if 8% is even correct.
My experience with blogging is that about half of the people who come to my blog come through google searches. If you asked them if they were reading blogs, they might incorrectly say that they weren't, and believe it. Go to a Wikipedia article on a modern, well known personage. If it has any detail at all, it very likely has a few blogs as references.
The 8% is not a bunch of dummies or people without influence. I recently met Dick Wadhams, the guru who, if we are lucky, will be leading the Republican party. When I told him I was promoting Republican blogs, he commented that blogs were a part of the effort to beat Tom Daschle.
Newspapers like to justify their existence by claiming that they provide an in depth version of the news. That is true when compared to non-cable television and radio. However, when compared to a blog that wants to do some independent internet searches, newspapers are, themselves, lacking in depth.
There are stories that newspapers choose not to cover. Is the uproar over the "Labor Peace Act" a story worth reporting in Colorado Springs? It doesn't seem to be.
The 8%, if it is 8%, are the people who have an appetite for something that the newspapers can't, or won't give them.